With that in mind, we thought we’d present this modest introduction to the neighborhood. It’s not much, but it will encourage your natural curiosity and soften the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by directing you to the elements of Williamsburg life that will be the most comfortable to you and that have been developed with you strictly in mind.
Williamsburg hasn’t got a meal plan, but everyone under a certain age eats at all the same places all the time, so it might as well! There are also stores where everyone’s clothes come from—a collective Williamsburg Co-op, if you will. There’s a campus green, and dorms, some of which were built under the present administration in impressive glass and steel that both disgust and impress our alumni. (We even got our own “endowment” to make that happen—but in the real world that’s called a tax abatement.)
Everything’s pretty close to everything else—again, just like campus!—but the B61, the L and the G form a sort of campus shuttle. So lace up those retro Nikes (or Sauconys, if you’re studious!) and start walking!
One thing to keep in mind: Like all college towns, Williamsburg has its share of grown-ups around. These can be bosses, or grumpy old artists who say they’ve been there forever and seem to like dirt and poverty. They like to remind you that once upon a time there were only a few grimy bars, one Thai place, one coffee shop and no boutique clothing stores—just some giant warehouse called Domsey’s that isn’t near the L. Never mind! It’s a race between high rent, death and exasperation to see which will drive them out of the neighborhood first. You won’t have to lift a finger.
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DORM LIFE
Let’s start with where you live. A key factor is how far you are willing to walk to get to the Bedford Avenue L stop. Like the Student Center, there’s nothing there that doesn’t repeat itself in every micro-neighborhood of Williamsburg: a thrift store, a few bars, a bagel place, a bodega, a pizza joint and someplace to pick up a packet of seitan or C. Howard’s violet-flavored gum. But since it’s right at the first L stop in Williamsburg, it’s sort of the place you have to swoop through if you want to feel like you know what’s going on.
You’ll go there often at first, so you don’t want to be too far away. But then, the further you are, the cheaper the rent.
You might have got one of those railroad apartments—and if you’re lucky, the front room has its own door, which means you and your roommates don’t have to traipse through each others’ bedrooms to get to the bathroom in the back by the kitchen!
Or else you’re in what might have been a pretty little brick townhouse covered in aluminum or plastic siding some decades back. There is no cat in the house, but it sure smells like one!
Fear not. Room draw in Williamsburg (it’s called the Real Estate Market, but it’s just as random) is no worse than anywhere else.
But once you advance a year, where to go? It will say a lot about who you are, and in Williamsburg, neighbors are apt to become the stalwarts of your new New York kinship network. As Evelyn Waugh once said of Oxford, you spend the second year getting rid of all the friends you made your first year. So where to move once your Craigslist roommate finally crosses the fine line between postgrad louche and bona fide meth addict and it’s time to scoot?
On principle, East Williamsburg’s massively shoddy, cramped, hard-partying wonderland, the McKibbin Lofts, is less cool because of last month’s front-page Times profile, but it’s still “an art-school dorm,” says a former neighbor. A local architect in a drone-rock band likes going to parties there, even though he once got an egg thrown at him from a McKibbin rooftop and it hit his “sand-suede Clarks desert boots.” Things could be worse: “Bedbug-central! Chlamydia! It houses a lot of the STDs that come from everywhere,” said another local.
But its geographic location—far from everything but the Morgan L stop—guarantees a certain cachet as well. This is the off-campus apartment, a place to aspire to live your second year in Williamsburg if you haven’t yet hit it big.
But if your parents have got the dosh, you can skip that step and move directly into the Rocket Factory at 100 South Fourth Street. This place is for the arty yuppies, the ones who shun both labels and belong to neither group but can be described no other way. A sign on the front door from a big production company asks for an apartment to feature in a film about an Idaho orphan who “discovers his place in the New York City art world.”
If you’re still in Williamsburg by the time you reach middle management at an arts organization in Chelsea, you might want to consider the Esquire Building at 330 Wythe. Yes, they made shoe polish there once upon a time! And some of the aura must be messing with the feng shui. Residents sustained, for the better part of two years, a bitter squabble over what color to paint their apartment doors; Teal and Dark Charcoal each had its partisans, but the final compromise was a purplish affair called Raisin Torte.
“They’re into the austere, raw look, and they’re very proud of that,” a broker said of the residents, contrasting them with those who live a little farther south in the Gretsch Building.
The Gretsch is that thing way on the south side of Williamsburg that looks like it was built by the firm that brought you Stonehenge. The building was a warren of DIY “lofts” for years before a developer came in and made the building into pretty condo units. While the prices are high, the quantity of Ikea furniture visible from the street will give you an idea of how accessible the Gretsch will be to you if you opt to stay in Williamsburg past your first promotion.
Sometimes the responsibilities of adulthood are thrust upon the young when they least expect it. That’s what will happen if you move to the Aurora, at 30 Bayard. The just-built park-front building, which reportedly set a neighborhood record last year with a $3.8 million sale, has mostly young couples with wee Williamsburgers in tow. Babies having babies!
“There are a lot of people that got pregnant after they moved in,” says a broker.
Besides the families, there’s this one really model-like Japanese guy, a neighbor says. (Write to us on Craigslist’s missed connections, O.K.? LOL!)
EATING, DRINKING AND SHOPPING, OR, PLACES TO LOOK REALLY CUTE
There’s not much in the way of gray sweatshirts that say “Williamsburg” in a collegiate slab-serif across the bust, but a small exercise in translation will be necessary anyway to explain to you the rules of the Williamsburg color guard.
Start at Buffalo Exchange, where you can fill your closet with the school colors: plaid, clash, and ugly! Blindingly bright ’80s-style togs, iridescent leggings and shiny windbreakers are like the spirit sticks of the Bedford set. Don’t forget the handbands and knee socks with shorts! And for the boys: A little ambient dinge is not only fine—it is to be cultivated. Jeans should be slightly shiny, like the paint they call “eggshell finish.”
If you find you just can’t get the hang of it, you can always go the obvious route by shopping at Brooklyn Industries, where things actually say Brooklyn right on them! But beware—that might be a little bit too obvious. If you plan to spend time in public in Williamsburg, you should look more like something that just leapt out of (a) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, (b) Franny and Zooey, (c) a Neu! video or (d) the closet.
Not everything older than 25 is worthless. Take the Brooklyn Brewery, where that ubiquitous quaff of aley-tasting beer is brewed and, in fact, served! On a given Friday night or Saturday morning, a massive sea of picnic tables seat as many of the bros in button-ups and white baseball caps as can be found in the neighborhood. They’re playing Beer Pong and Quarters, which is either cool in an ironic way or just plain cool, but probably not uncool. High five!
Occasionally in postcollege life it becomes necessary to exercise your brain, which can be hard to do when there is no alcohol around, and harder to do when there is! The solution may
well be Trivia Night at Pete’s Candy Store. These are not like those depressing things on the Upper East Side where old alcoholics stare at a screen and answer dumb questions with a little thing in their laps until it’s time to stumble home to the cats. But that would be cool, though. No, here you’ll learn how to identify a song when it is played backward. Pete’s also has free BBQ in the summer and all sorts of other mind-expanding educational classes like spelling bees, Scrabble and bingo!
Sometimes a styrofoam cup of hard noodles or a questionable burrito from next to the Lorimer Street subway stop just won’t do the trick, and you need more than just something to soak up all that mojito sloshing around in your gut.
Consider Enid’s your “home away from home,” where you can roll out of bed in your sweatpants with “JUICY” spelled across the butt, eat brunch with your friends and review last night’s house-party happenings. “Did you, like, see that girl?”
If you happen to live a little bit east, there are plenty of places for basic provender. Sumac, right next to the Lorimer L stop, is one of those kinds of places where you can get cans of Pellegrino Aranciata with the little foil tops; so is Khim’s, the Korean deli at Grand and Bedford that sells chocolate too nice for most gourmet shops in Manhattan, even if the front does look a bit like every Korean grocery you’ve ever been to. Never judge a book by its cover!
Speaking of which! If you’re looking for the kind of place that will give you an escape from your awful apartment while you work on the next Great American Novel or a grant application, you could do worse than Café Grumpy up north, or the vast Roebling Tea Room further south. It’s also a good place to read the newspaper on your computer.
Of course, actual newspapers are for suckers and for people who aren’t good with computers. But Vice magazine is for neither, so you should pick up a copy. It’s basically news that only you can possibly use. What you shouldn’t be caught dead wearing on Bedford Avenue, but also what certain people think is the next thing. It almost always is, so embrace it even if you feel like a fucknut in those sunglasses with no lenses but just slats! It means more if you did it before it was cool.
Speaking of which, there are some places in Williamsburg that are really nice, but it’s a crap shoot whether it’s cool to pay that much money for food that is mostly not seitan.
Still, when your folks come to town to visit, they might want to absorb a little of the local color instead of making you meet them for dinner at like Del Posto or some shit.
When that happens, it’s good to know about places like Aurora. On a given night there, between the rustic stylings of the dining room and the breezy, beautiful garden, you’ll find you’re not the only one bringing the ’rents out for a bite. And it’s a bit out of the way, down on Grand Street, so roving packs of pierced kids won’t acknowledge you on the street and ask you how you’re recovering from the previous night’s bender.
If your parents are really fancy, go to Dressler. There will be lots of professional- (and old-) looking people there.
When things get boring at bars, restaurants, cafes and little shops, you sometimes have to buy tickets to events.
By no means overlook the activity center, McCarren Pool! Here is where all the cool bands like Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie and the Black Lips play. (O.K., maybe some of them are not cool. But many are.) There’re also movies like Wet Hot American Summer. (Is Michael Ian Black your hero? Srsly?!!!1!) And what is supercool and ironic is that on Sundays there are dodgeball games—dodgeball!—and hot babes participating in a Slip ’N’ Slide slam. Great spot for flirting with new friends, btw!
Nearby is the place to establish yourself in the Williamsburg social ecology this summer. It’s called McCarren Park, but you can secretly think of it as the Quad.
By all means join the kickball and hacky-sack games if you want to be that type. Or grab a drink from the nearby dive, the Turkey’s Nest, and splay out on the lawn, checking out everyone’s bikes and hot legs in summer skirts. In Williamsburg, unlike in south Brooklyn, smoking is cool. Nobody will complain.
When it’s time to detox and get healthy, you’ll want to enroll at the YMCA in Greenpoint. It’s a bit of a social network because of the low price and the nice Village People irony of it all. Polish bodybuilders abound, but they are by now so used to your prancings on the StairMaster that it’s probably they, and not you, who will stop going there first.
GET INVOLVED!
After you’ve been here a while, you may find that some things need improvement.
Is Williamsburg green enough? Are there opportunities to enjoy the finer things in life, like composting, parks and bike racks, for the less fortunate people who were here before you and will probably be here after you leave?
Evan Thies is a 29-year-old running for City Council to represent the neighborhood.
Here’s what he thinks you can do.
“We are finally in sight of the promised land,” he told us on the phone.
He admits that he doesn’t fit the typical profile of the Williamsburg hipster.
“I think I’m really one of the most square people in Williamsburg,” he said. “When I moved here, I think I was the only person on my block wearing a suit. I still am. But with my age combined with a suit, it’s helpful; people trust me, like an accountant.”
But he hopes that won’t keep the slangy youth from joining him in a bit of Hipster Civics.
“With the influx of new residents into the area, coupled with all the families that have been here for generations, you have a potent mix of activism.”
Activism? Where? What can excited “new residents” do?
Now, the G does double duty standing for “Good Growth,” and the group focuses specifically on “a desire to recapture the waterfront, reduce local environmental hazards, and advocate for public policies promoting healthy mixed-use communities,” according to its Web site.
Mr. Thies’ second suggestion is for the more “avant-garde” of you.
The $50 million McCarren Park Pool renovation is about to take place.
“The pool won’t be available anymore next summer, so the arts programming and the concerts will have to leave,” Mr. Thies said.
Gasp. Mr. Thies recommends that concerned “younger folks” turn to the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, a brand-new organization focusing on the relocation of the pool’s concert venues and art projects to the Brooklyn waterfront.
Then, after you fight for space for Feist to play, stay in McCarren Park and compost.
Saturday mornings the women of United Friends of McCarren Park are stationed in their compost-corner, over the fence, next to the small-dog park. This is a fantastic activity to remember if you are trying to score points with a Park Slope love interest.
This is your invitation, Williamsburgers. It might be worth dialing up Mr. Thies, if you plan to stay a while.
Do you?
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